Tuesday, April 11, 2017

You have submitted your app to the Apple App Store after months of development and spending a lot of money to get it right. Congratulations! “But wait”, you might think, “is there anything I need to be aware of after my app has gone live?” Sure, there is.

Challenges

Many app owners forget to consider that there are ongoing efforts and costs in order to keep their app healthy and profitable. Without preparing for the challenges of maintaining an app you’ll likely find yourself in a reactive position – putting out fires – rather than pro-actively working on a successful lifecycle. There are a multitude of threats that your app will face and additional issues that are not evident, but might have an even deeper impact on how your app may prosper.

Monitoring

Although fixing bugs seems obvious, you need to know how to prioritise bugs and crashes, i.e. when to fix what. How does a crash impact your user base? What is the frequency of a crash? The answer to theses questions is provided by crash monitoring and reporting.

Compatibility

The second most evident technical challenge are new iOS releases. Just remember the UI appearance switch from iOS 6 to iOS 7. Although this switch did not pose a threat to the health of apps at that time, it soon became a turning point for acceptable styling and design of modern apps. And there are technical challenges with new iOS releases. The upcoming iOS 8 will most probably not support 32 bit applications anymore. Last but not least, your users will expect your app to support new iOS and device features. As a bonus, implementing support for new features will help your app getting featured in the App Store.

Compatibility challenges are also lurking around another corner. Many apps rely on third party services and frameworks. Remember Parse? Facebook decided to turn down Parse, a mobile backend as a service provider, in 2016. Many apps were impacted by this decision and app owners who did not react to this announcement were faced with their apps not working anymore as of January 28, 2017. App owners have to be wary of changes to services and frameworks that their apps are depending on. Taking these changes into account well in advance is of utmost importance to the health of your app.

Updates

Finally your changes and fixes have to be aligned and incorporated in an app update. Updating sounds easy and should be a streamlined process, but we all know that there are several things that could go wrong. Besides, frequent updates are important because your users are expecting you to keep your app up-to-date.

User Feedback and Engagement

In addition to technical challenges you have to react to user feedback and drive engagement. However, user feedback can be tricky and blindly following demands and criticism in reviews or support emails might not work out as expected. The most valuable information about what users really want and expect is usage tracking. Do not listen to your customers, monitor what they are actually doing and trying to accomplish. Analytical monitoring of user behaviour should be part of every app, because it is invaluable to use as a basis for future decisions.

Delighting users with the next big thing is great, but initially attracting users is not enough for long term success. Users need to be drawn to your app again and again. You want them to use your app on a regular basis and therefore reminding them of its value is key to ongoing engagement. This can be accomplished by fresh content or features as well as general forms of notifying your users, such as push notifications, emails, and special events.

appCare

To sum up there are a lot of tasks that have to be executed during the lifetime of an app. Maintaining a mobile app is a full-time job. “Oh my, how much will this cost?”, you might ask yourself. A good rule of thumb is that you should expect to spend 10-20% of the total cost of development as maintenance each year for a well-developed app. The good news is that you are able to reduce costs by opting in to a regular maintenance service versus per case maintenance paid by the hour.

appCare offers to care for your app and resolve the aforementioned challenges on a monthly paid service plan. We - appGarten - are providing a maintenance service that offers high quality for an affordable price. Ordering appCare is easy and hassle-free. Get your quote today on appgarten.io.

Monday, April 03, 2017

Data is King! There is no doubt that data driven decisions and reasoning is better than guessing. Without data and analytics you are blind. Analytics platforms provide raw data and basic analysis for Apps in the Apple App Store. But there is an often overlooked difference between analytics and getting insights.

There are great options for App and App Store analytics platforms, such as App Annie, AppMonsta, and Appfigures - to name just a few. If you have ever had a look at one of these platforms you might have experienced an overwhelming wealth of data and charts. Although theses platforms are trying to visualise data in order to ease the analysis, such tools are made for experts that have years of experience interpreting charts and data and deducing insights. There still needs to be a human who looks at the data and deducts recommendations and next steps out of it.

The path from data to insight isn’t an easy one and it takes creativity, reasoning and a lot of experience in order to come to the right conclusions, which finally result in recommendations for marketing actions as well as implementing improvements, changes, and whole new features for your App.

appInsight does exactly what it says on the tin, it provides insight into issues, quick wins, improvements, competition, and ways to grow downloads and reviews. And it is easy. You just name your App and receive an easy to understand and to the point report, which shows you recommendations for improving your App’s representation in the store as well as its usage and acceptance by your users.

Recommendations are grouped into the App’s feature set, UI appearance, iTunes metadata that have an impact on your App’s performance in the store, potential and actual technical risks, as well as business considerations. For instance appInsight will tell you what to do in order to get featured in the App Store, how to change or extend your iTunes metadata in detail, if your UI needs to be revamped, if your App is in danger to be removed from the App Store and how to avoid this from happening.

In addition, the report shows your peer group and how your competition is doing and last but not least explains the reasons for our recommendations.

Wednesday, March 29, 2017

Your iOS App is in the Apple App Store? Congratulations! You have reached the first stage of a marathon. Besides the obvious challenges there are many tasks lurking in the Apple community and ecosystem.

The most prominent challenges are competition, App Store approval and survival, iOS compatibility, great user experience, and integrating upcoming platform features in your App. Both, Apple and your users are demanding and they are expecting you to keep up with platform changes and to constantly introduce improvements and new features. Whereas the latter might be at the core of your business the others are of course important but often a pain to monitor and consider in your future releases.

This is where we come into the picture. appGarten.io is the solution for problems that iOS App owners and developers are facing in the Apple ecosystem. It is run by owners and developers who have experienced these challenges and many more first hand and are providing services for fortune 500 companies and small businesses world-wide alike. appGarten takes care of your App with appInsight, appCare, and appServices.

appInsight compares your App to your main competitors and checks for technical risks, security vulnerabilities and gives a completely new view on your App based on customers' feedback and what your competitors do. Ever wonder why your competition is doing better than you? Let appInsight reveal the details.

appCare takes over the code, enhances it with crash monitoring, fixes bugs, releases it to the App Store and keeps your App up-to-date with the latest iOS releases. It reveals what your customers complain about and request for future releases. To sum up, appCare ensures health as well as platform compatibility and helps you to keep your customers happy.

appServices does customer support, implements new features and improvements, enables your App for new devices, optimizes the visibility in the App store and much more. It is a full-fledged, no worries service and support package for your Apps.

We will explain appGarten’s products in detail in our next posts. Stay tuned.